Second distributed ledger project from Hyperledger announced

Hyperledger is an open source blockchain project from the Linux Foundation. Now it has released Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0, an open source digital ledger project.

The newly released Sawtooth 1.0 joins its sister project, Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 which was released in July last year. Today, on-chain governance is popular when it comes to open source distributed ledger products. It lets members adjust the rules on the fly as required and dynamic consensus to modify the blockchain consensus protocol as the technology advances.

Sawtooth 1.0 offers advanced transaction execution that provides the ability to execute transactions in parallel and support for multiple languages and Ethereum. James Mitchell, CEO at Bitwise IO is a vendor who helps companies build applications on top of Sawtooth was drawn to these features.

The way Linux has many flavors, there will be different open source blockchain projects that meet different needs and take different approaches to solving common problems. Hyperledger actually has several blockchain projects in various stages of development along with a number of specialized tools. Sawtooth 1.0 is available for download now.

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According to James, who is also a big contributor to the Sawtooth project, “We were attracted to it because of focus on fundamentals. We saw a lot of platforms based on bitcoin’s work. Sawtooth had some key points on what [we believed] a distributed ledger needed,” he said. That included a mechanism for adversarial trust and mechanisms to guarantee the trust.

Brian Behlendorf, executive director at Hyperledger sees room for more than one approach to distributed ledgers and the market can decide which one is best. “Let’s leave it up to developers to decide what features and differences they want to make and let market decide if this is meaningful difference or not,” he said.

Hyperledger aims to create common distributed ledger technology that enables organizations to build and run robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support their individual business transactions. The project has grown to more than 185 members since its inception, It covers industries such as finance, healthcare, the Internet of Things, credit card services, supply chain and aeronautics, among several others.

Mitchell agrees. “All of these platforms will mature past 1.0. One of the exciting things is there is a ton of cross pollination and we can afford to try different things and see what’s working well,” he said.

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